AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon HealthLake
SEATTLE, July 16, 2021 -- Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the general availability of Amazon HealthLake, a HIPAA-eligible service for healthcare and life sciences organizations to ingest, store, query, and analyze their health data at scale. Amazon HealthLake uses machine learning to understand and extract meaningful medical information from unstructured data, and then organizes, indexes, and stores that information in chronological order. The result provides a holistic view of patient health. The service leverages the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) industry standard format to further enable interoperability by facilitating the exchange of information across healthcare systems, pharmaceutical companies, clinical researchers, health insurers, patients, and more. Amazon HealthLake is a new service that is part of AWS for Health, a comprehensive offering of AWS services and AWS Partner Network solutions used by thousands of healthcare and life sciences customers globally. AWS for Health provides proven and easily accessible capabilities that help organizations increase the pace of innovation, unlock the potential of health data, and develop more personalized approaches to therapeutic development and care. As part of AWS for Health, Amazon HealthLake further facilitates customers’ application of analytics and machine learning on top of their newly normalized and structured data. Doing so enables customers to examine trends like disease progression at the individual or population health level over time, spot opportunities for early intervention, and deliver personalized medicine. To get started with Amazon HealthLake, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/healthlake. For more information on AWS for Health, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/health.
The healthcare industry is being transformed through the cloud and the utilization of data, helping organizations uncover new insights and deliver improved patient care. Healthcare organizations are creating huge volumes of patient information every day, and the majority of this data is unstructured and contained in clinical notes, laboratory reports, insurance claims, medical images, recorded conversations, and graphs that are in different formats and spread across disparate systems. Before customers can derive a single insight (e.g. flag high-risk diabetic patients predicted to develop further complications), they have to aggregate, structure, and normalize this data. Then it must be tagged, indexed, and put in chronological order. This is a time-consuming and error-prone process. Some healthcare organizations use optical character recognition and build rule-based tools to automate the process of transforming unstructured data and extracting clinical information (e.g. diagnoses, medications, and procedures). However, these options are often inaccurate and can’t account for variations in spelling, typos, or grammatical errors. Even after organizations are able to aggregate and structure their data, they still need to build their own analytics and machine learning applications to reveal relationships in the data, discover trends, and make precise predictions. The cost and operational complexity of this work is prohibitive to most organizations. As a result, the vast majority of organizations cannot realize the full potential of their data to help improve the health of patients and communities.
Amazon HealthLake removes this heavy lifting by using highly accurate machine learning to automate the extraction and transformation of unstructured health data so organizations can apply advanced analytics and customized machine learning models to their information. Using Amazon HealthLake, organizations can easily move their FHIR-formatted health data from on-premises systems to a secure data lake in the cloud. Amazon HealthLake uses specially tuned machine learning models that understand medical terminology to identify and tag each piece of clinical information. The service then enriches data with standardized labels (e.g. medications, conditions, diagnoses, etc.) so the data can be easily searched and analyzed. Amazon HealthLake also indexes events like patient visits into a timeline, giving medical professionals a holistic, chronological view of each patient’s medical history. Once this heavy lifting is completed, customers can apply analytics and machine learning on top of this newly normalized and structured data. For example, customers can apply analytics using Amazon QuickSight to understand patient and population-level trends, as well as build powerful machine learning models with Amazon SageMaker to help make accurate predictions about the progression of disease, the efficacy of clinical trials, the eligibility of insurance claims, and more. Amazon HealthLake also stores data in the FHIR format to facilitate the exchange of information so that it is easy for organizations, researchers, and practitioners to collaborate and accelerate breakthroughs in treatments, deliver vaccines to market faster, and discover health trends in patient populations. Customers who do not already have data in the FHIR format can work with AWS Connector Partners, such as Diameter Health, InterSystems, Redox, and HealthLX, who have built validated Amazon HealthLake connectors to transform existing healthcare data into FHIR format and move it to Amazon HealthLake.
Amazon HealthLake’s purpose-built analytics and machine learning capabilities are also now available to customers under AWS for Health, a growing portfolio of solutions that simplifies how healthcare, biopharma, and genomics organizations discover, assess, and deploy cloud solutions to achieve better business and patient outcomes. For example, solutions offered in AWS for Health are helping customers create holistic Electronic Health Records to help clinicians make data-driven care plans, accelerate research and discovery to bring new therapies to market faster, and powering population genomic initiatives to expand precision medicine accessibility.
“More and more of our customers in the healthcare and life sciences space are looking to organize and make sense of their reams of data, but are finding this process challenging and cumbersome,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Amazon Machine Learning for AWS. “We built Amazon HealthLake to remove this heavy lifting for healthcare organizations so they can transform health data in the cloud in minutes and begin analyzing that information securely at scale. Alongside AWS for Health, we’re excited about how Amazon HealthLake can help medical providers, health insurers, and pharmaceutical companies provide patients and populations with data-driven, personalized, and predictive care.”
Amazon HealthLake is available now in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon), with additional region availability coming soon.
About Amazon Web Services
For over 15 years, Amazon Web Services has been a comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any cloud workload, and it now has more than 200 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 81 Availability Zones within 25 geographic regions, with announced plans for 21 more Availability Zones and seven more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Israel, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.
About Amazon
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to be Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company, Earth’s Best Employer, and Earth’s Safest Place to Work. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Career Choice, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Just Walk Out technology, Amazon Studios, and The Climate Pledge are some of the things pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about.
Source: AWS
